Information handling devices (“devices” or “electronic devices”), for example laptop computers, smart phones, tablet devices, and the like are utilized for communicating data over a network, for example accessing the Internet via a WI-FI access point or a telecommunication cell tower to download media content, send electronic communications, etc. In situations where many client nodes desire to communicate with the Internet (or another large network) through a single node or a limited set of nodes, termed herein “gateway(s)” to the broader network, noisy or especially busy nodes, i.e., those nodes requesting or sending network traffic through the gateway node, can consume far more than their fair share of the available bandwidth. Common examples of this include apartment complexes, hotels, and publicly available access points to which many user devices connect. Similar scenarios, however, may be encountered in a simple home network, e.g., where end user devices compete for bandwidth available from an Internet router when downloading large amounts of data, such as when multiple devices are attempting to stream video content using a single router device.
A common scenario is therefore to have a shallow network, i.e., with many internal nodes (e.g., laptops, tablets, smart phones, etc.) connected directly to the broader network using a gateway device (e.g., many end user devices connected directly to a single router). Where this type of scenario is encountered, data management techniques such as dropping of packets, queuing of packets, and/or controlled queuing of packets is/are often employed, e.g., based on a particular link's permissible data rate.